EDITOR’S NOTE: The Secret of Seagull Island was on the CBS Late Movie on May 27, 1983.
The TV miniseries Seagull Island is 3 hours and 36 minutes long. The movie they hacked into is an hour and forty-two minutes long. As you can imagine, a lot gets lost, but this is not unique. Yor Hunter from the Future and The Scorpion With Two Tails were also originally made as TV miniseries that were edited.
Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome, Who Can Kill a Child?) has come to Rome to visit her blind concert-pianist sister, Marianne Saunders (Sherry Buchanan, Eyes Behind the Stars). It turns out that she’s the third blind girl to go missing recently, so like many a gialli heroine, Barbara investigates the case along with British Consulate Martin Foster (Nicky Henson). Her detective work takes her to the private island of millionaire David Malcom (Jeremy Brett), a place filled with secrets and, yes, the bodies of women without their eyes.
This is the kind of movie where the sounds of seagulls make a woman so upset that she jumps right out a window, and where ineffective cops literally have waiters in the squad room ready to bring them hard-boiled eggs.
As for this movie, it makes me wonder. A spoiler, but why don’t rich people with deformed children look into a support group or working with a professional instead of doing it on their own and getting beautiful women killed? Then again, so many gialli would never be made if these fictional families got it together.
